


Consume/Consummate

by redredribbons



Category: Venom (Comics)
Genre: Angst, First Time, Internalized Biphobia, Internalized Homophobia, Other, Unhealthy Relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-30
Updated: 2018-11-30
Packaged: 2019-09-02 10:40:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,726
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16785313
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/redredribbons/pseuds/redredribbons
Summary: Eddie and Venom both understand loneliness, which means they understand each other.Sort of inspired by the scene of Eddie and Venom bonding in "Dark Origin".





	Consume/Consummate

**Author's Note:**

> "Dark Origin" is terrible and I don't recommend it. I'm not sure why I got this bizarre urge to write fic loosely based on the maybe one good scene from it, but here we are.

Eddie felt it most often when he was on the verge of sleep. Perhaps his defenses were weakest when he traversed that liminal space between waking and dreams. At first he chalked it up to erratic subconscious activity: a random slideshow of seemingly random memories fading in and out of awareness. After a few nights of this, however, Eddie began to suspect. The memories started to feel less random and more like someone digging through a pile of old photos to pull out certain highlights.

Or, in this case, lowlights.

The memories became not only more focused, but also more miserable. Eddie had no reason at all to think about the slog of his childhood years. There was nothing for him there except rejection and misery. So when these memories started appearing more frequently, and with greater clarity, there was an obvious culprit.

“What the hell are you doing?” Eddie snapped, fully awake again.

Venom, to Eddie’s surprise, shrank away. 

“I only wanted to understand,” Venom said, uncharacteristically sheepish.

“Not much to it, pal. My dad’s an asshole. My sister wants nothing to do with me. I’ve been a fuckup at every stage of my life and ruined every good thing that’s ever come my way. Any questions?” Eddie growled. He rolled over onto his other side, as if he could turn away from Venom.

Silence fell. Eddie started drifting off to sleep again, optimistic that he’d shut down this particular string of Venom’s oft-insatiable curiosity. 

“I think I _do_ understand, Eddie,” that soft voice murmured against Eddie’s ear. Venom’s presence outside his body startled him.

Eddie slung his forearm over his eyes. He wanted to be annoyed with Venom, but given that sleep was a lost cause most nights anyway, anger hardly seemed worth the effort. Though Eddie had yet to learn how to explore Venom’s memories as well as it had his, he could sense its emotions vividly, as if they were his own. There was no judgment or mockery in Venom’s intent. Quite the opposite; the earnestness of it made Eddie’s heart ache strangely. 

“Yeah? What makes you say that? You have a shitty dad too or something, back on your planet?” Eddie grunted. 

“Will show you,” Venom said, “If you’ll let me.”

A weight stirred on Eddie’s chest. The thin blanket was suddenly too warm, so he kicked it aside to expose his bare skin to the cool air. He moved his arm and saw Venom amassed into a blob on his torso. It watched him and waited for a reply. Something about this moment felt fragile. Eddie could sense how important this was to Venom, even if he couldn’t quite grasp why. And he’d be lying if he said he weren’t genuinely curious. He’d always been the type who had to _know_ , who devoured every piece of knowledge he could about a subject that caught his interest. This trait had served him well as an investigative reporter. And there was nothing on  Earth more fascinating to him than Venom. 

“Okay. Go ahead,” Eddie swallowed. He was nervous and unsure what to expect. Was he supposed to do something? Would it hurt?

Instead, what he felt was something like an automatic door opening in his mind, inviting him to enter a space previously unknown.

Eddie allowed the passage, and then he was no longer himself.

_The sky was a sickly pale purple, stark against the blood-colored stone that stretched on as far as this host’s feeble eyes could see. Everything was huge and cold and threatening. Existence was nothing more than involuntary nerve impulses driving the host’s tiny, rodent-like body from one biological imperative to the next. While these base functions were enough for a bare minimum of physical survival, they did nothing to appease the emptiness. Attempts at communication with others of the host’s kind had been useless. Their brains were too small and simple to form thoughts. All too soon, the host’s limbs slowed to dead weights, the organs sagged and grew still, the ever-present background tingle of nerve synapses stuttered to a halt. Then, nothing but toxic air and that gaping, ever-present emptiness._

He screamed as the alien landscape faded back to peeling wallpaper and water stains. 

Venom arched forward toward Eddie. It spanned the width of the bed, blocking out the dim yellow light from the cracked ceiling fixture. The tentacles closest to him trembled a little, hovering awkwardly like a person who didn’t know what to do with their hands during a hug. 

“That was— _you_?” Eddie gasped, still reeling from the unearthly vision.

“I had never had a choice,” Venom said, “And I was all alone.Like you. We both did what we had to in order to survive. I was forced to live with inferior, non-sentient hosts. Others of my kind would have found this ideal, I suppose. They always sought hosts who would be nothing more than empty vessels. Easy to control and easy to dispose of once consumed and broken.”

“Consumed and broken, huh?” Eddie swallowed. He’d been with Venom for a while now but didn’t feel any more broken than he had before meeting it. Would the process be so slow and subtle, that he wouldn’t notice until it was too late? Would he awaken one day to find his body was nothing more than Venom’s puppet, like the alien rat creature in its memories? That creature had died from the strain of symbiosis. “Is that... what you’re gonna do to me?”

“Never!” Venom hissed. Its fangs snapped inches from Eddie’s face. “I’m not like the others!”

Eddie held his breath. His muscles tensed as the idea of running away crossed his mind. It was absurd, of course; he could no more outrun Venom than he could outrun his own arm. And besides, he sensed no predatory intentions from Venom. The alien seemed unsure of itself, almost timid.

Venom’s pearly eyespots shimmered as it continued. “That’s how I’m _supposed_ to be, but I don’t like it. And that’s why I was alone. It hurts. Feeling a host die. Being chained to their corpse. The frantic search for something, _anything_ else. It _hurts.”_

Eddie had never heard Venom this distraught before. The urge to comfort it took him by surprise. He knew that soul-crushing loneliness all too well. Eddie lifted a hand to the side of Venom’s face. He had no idea what passed for succor among its species but a physical connection— gentle and deliberate, instead of aggressive and reactive like their fusion— felt right. 

Venom was so smooth that it was _soft_ , slick but not wet. Not like anything else on Earth. Eddie resisted the urge to sink his fingers into the pliant alien matter and, worried that he’d overstepped a boundary, pulled away. But Venom coiled a tentacle around his wrist to tug the hand back.

“So what _do_ you want?” Eddie whispered. His fingers wandered along Venom’s gaping jaw, pressing into black substance that was both flesh-like and liquid, yielding under his touch yet infinitely resilient. 

“I want...” Venom began. Its emotions seethed into indistinct cloud-shapes. “...a bond.”

“Isn’t that what we have?” Eddie said, “Since you’re not hurting me?”

“Not yet. We share a connection. We’re perfectly compatible. But a bond is... more.”

_Perfectly compatible_. Eddie tried not to read too much into those words. There was no way Venom could have intended the uniquely human romantic connotation they carried.

“We’ll be greater than we are by ourselves. And we’ll be inseparable. Forever,” Venom continued, its voice shrinking to a tremulous rumble at the lower edge of human hearing range. Seeing Venom so obviously _nervous_ sent an unexpected surge of affection through Eddie. Here was an otherworldly being, forged from the voids of space, possessed of unimaginable strength and power, confessing its feelings like a shy teenager. 

“So you’ll never leave me...” Eddie murmured. He so wanted to believe it. He remembered the vows he exchanged with Anne: _til death do us part_. And remembered that she left him anyway. He withdrew his hand from Venom’s face.

“Is that all bonding is to humans? Saying things?” Venom asked. Eddie blinked in confusion when he heard Venom’s verbal response to his unspoken words. He was still figuring out how much Venom could see— it seemed that that the more vivid the memory, the stronger the emotion, the more Venom could comprehend.

“I guess? I used to think it was more than that, but... I guess, yeah, that’s all it is,” Eddie said bitterly. When he was growing up he’d spent every Sunday in church with his father, absorbing lessons about the importance of holy matrimony, the sanctity of the union between _man_ and _woman_. So when the time came for his own union, Eddie had insisted that he and Anne exchange vows properly in a Catholic Church with God as their witness. In the end, all the blessings in the world were no match for a few signatures on the divorce paperwork.

“For us, it’s more,” Venom said. It trailed a tentacle across the stubble on Eddie’s cheek in a mirror of his earlier touch. “Words are transient. Gone as soon as you say them. But true bonding is...” it paused, and Eddie caught more wisps of emotion as Venom struggled to express itself in human language, “...the very matter of our bodies. The essence of our beings. Woven together as one.” 

Venom uncurled a cluster of small tendrils and twined them through Eddie’s fingers. Eddie froze at that all-too-human gesture. Hand-holding was what he’d done what Anne. With the couple of long-term girlfriends he’d had before settling down with her. Definitely not with the boys he’d fooled around with in darkened frat house rooms in college, when he’d succumbed to urges he couldn’t face during daylight. Urges that drove him to the campus chapel’s confessional booth with the hellfire of self-loathing licking at his heels. Venom didn’t have human gender or sex characteristics, but there was no way Eddie could convince himself it was female, either. 

“Right now, you could still... reject me...” Venom continued with a visible flinch, “But after we bond, separation will cause us terrible pain.”

“So would rejecting you,” Eddie blurted. The tendrils holding his hand brushed across the fragile skin at his wrist. Eddie shivered. He knew he should be feeling revulsion. The shiver should have been from disgust. He should move his hand away. He shouldn’t feel that sinful warmth curling in his chest like steam from a hot, comforting drink. He thought of the confessional booth. He thought of the deep-seated relief he’d felt when his heart had chosen an _Anne_ instead of an _Andrew_.

“So you agree…?” Venom’s voice was a far-away rustle. 

“Yes,” Eddie whispered. Tears scattered into dew drops on his thick blond lashes. “Stay with me. Please.”

More tentacles crept up his neck, across his face, brushing over his ears and lips and damp eyelids. Eddie didn’t know what he’d been expecting, but it wasn’t gentle touches reminiscent of a new lover exploring his body. 

“Let me in, Eddie.”

“Yes. Yes,” he breathed. A slender tentacle brushed the seam of his lips. “ _Take me.”_

Venom surged forward and wrapped itself around Eddie, stopping just short of full fusion. It enveloped him until he could feel it pooling just beneath the surface of his skin to sheath his nerve endings. Fusion with Venom made Eddie feel invincible. Whatever this was, this new and strange partial state, made his chest tighten and his heart trip over itself. Venom felt the change, felt the warm, syrupy desire brewing in dark corners of Eddie’s brain. It slackened its hold just enough for Eddie to feel silky friction whenever his muscles twisted and flexed. 

Eddie bit his lip when his nipples rubbed against Venom. “So is bonding always this, uh... like this?”

“No. It’s never been like this. Never will be again. Only for us.” Something wet flicked against the shell of Eddie’s ear. His cock twitched in interest. He’d had more than a few intrusive thoughts about Venom’s tongue, but always aggressively shoved them away. It was _wrong_ , and he’d wanted to think those inclinations had vanished at the altar when the priest placed Anne’s hand in his. 

“Only what _we_ want,” Venom said. Another flicker of tongue, a sting of needle-like fangs. Eddie’s cock _throbbed_.

“Yeah?” He rasped, “And what would that be?”

“For humans, bonding involves certain... physical acts. And you want this,” Venom said. Its words were matter-of-fact, almost clinical, but as it spoke its mouth laved and nipped across Eddie’s muscular neck and shoulders. Eddie tried to tell himself that the contact was meaningless, that Venom couldn’t possibly know what it was doing...

Then Venom coalesced to loom over Eddie. It pressed down on his chest, tight against his nipples, before rippling down his torso and abs. Eddie gave an undignified yelp.

“Don’t you?” Venom asked with a tilt of its head, all earnestness and longing and wide, blank eyes that pulled at a thread of Eddie’s exposed soul.

Through Eddie’s betrayal by Peter Parker, his shattered attempt at matrimony, the cold metal of a gun barrel against his temple… God had never once answered him.

Venom did.

“I do,” Eddie said. And then thought, _til death do us part_. “But do you really know what you’re saying here?”

Venom’s answer was a long, slow lick from the center of Eddie’s chest all the way up to his lips. 

And then a purr so low that Eddie felt it more than heard it. “Let me in, Eddie.”

“So you know what this means...”

“I do,” Venom echoed. Then words were meaningless when Venom pushed its tongue into Eddie’s mouth. Thick saliva dribbled onto his face as he sucked on it, drawing it deeper into his throat until it tickled at his gag reflex. A tentacle began to slither around his cock. It started at the base then squeezed rhythmically as it coiled its way up to the tip at an unhurried pace. Eddie moaned around tongue filling his mouth— the sensation was almost too intense, like being stroked by multiple hands and buried in tight warmth all at once. Eddie’s consciousness bounced through an endless loop of _oh God make this last forever_ and _please more faster!_

Venom slurped its tongue back out of Eddie’s mouth so it could taste the salty trails along his cheeks. It purred, “Yes, Eddie, yes, we’re almost there...”

That delicious sensation of being engulfed spread outward from Eddie’s cock, so smooth and seamless that he was barely aware of it. Venom cupped his balls, plastered itself against his chest, teased a tendril between wet, parted lips. Shallowly at first, then deeper little by little. Just like the rest of Venom’s mass seeping into Eddie’s pores, his tissues, then his very cells. Tiny fronds of darkness tickled at his nostrils and ears and eyes like a thousand kisses. Eddie twitched at the feeling of unfamiliar fullness in his ass. He hadn’t even felt Venom entering there and he tried to tell himself that this was wrong _._ Not even the boys he fooled around with in college had touched him there. No one had. 

_This feels_ right _, doesn’t it, Eddie?_

And the truth was, it did. It felt good enough to milk fresh tears from Eddie’s dilated eyes. Venom’s deep voice vibrated inside his skull, as velvety as its body all over and inside his own. God remained as silent as ever.

_You’re perfect_. 

The tentacle in Eddie’s mouth stretched his jaw to its limit. He could feel the appendage deep in his body, deeper than it physically had any right to be. But there was no choking, no gagging, no discomfort. Only an incredible lightness, a cathartic helplessness. Almost like dreams he’d had from time to time, where he could breathe underwater. But this reality was even better: there was no longer a need for the labor of breath at all, with those inky tentacles holding him so tenderly and breathing for him as the other half of his soul slotted into place. He didn’t even have to close his own eyes as Venom flowed in, erasing the world with blackness. Eddie screamed in ecstasy, coming for what felt like eternity, until his consciousness slipped under and everything was subsumed in bliss.


End file.
